The greatest difficulty of young countries lies in the want of women: not only is this a bar to the natural increase of population; it is a deficiency preventive of permanency, destructive of religion; where woman is not there can be no home, no country.
How to obtain a supply of marriageable girls is a question which Canada, Tasmania, South Australia, New South Wales, have each in their turn attempted to solve by the artificial introduction of Irish work-house girls. The difficulty apparently got rid of, we begin to find that it is not so much as fairly seen; we have yet to look it squarely in the face. The point of the matter is that we should find not girls, but honest girls,—not women merely, but women fit to bear families in a free State.
One of the colonial superintendents, writing of a lately-received batch of Irish work-house girls, has said that, if these are the “well-conducted girls, he should be anxious to see a few of the evil-disposed.” While in South Australia, I read the details of the landing of a similar party of women from Limerick work-house one Sunday afternoon at Point Levi, the Lambeth of Quebec. Although supplied by the city authorities with meat and drink, and ordered to leave for Montreal at early morning, nothing could be more abominable than their conduct in the mean while. They sold baggage, bonnets, combs, cloaks, and scarfs, keeping on nothing but their crinolines and senseless finery. With the pence they thus collected they bought corn-whisky, and in a few hours were yelling, fighting, swearing, wallowing in beastly drunkenness; and by the time the authorities came down to pack them off by train, they were as fiends, mad with rum and wisky. At five in the morning, they reached the Catholic Home at Montreal, where the pious nuns were shocked and horrified at their grossness of conduct and lewd speech; nothing should force them, they declared, ever again to take into their peaceable asylum the Irish work-house girls. This was no exceptional case: the reports from South Australia, from Tasmania, can show as bad; and in Canada such conduct on the part of the freshly-landed girls is common. A Tasmanian magistrate has stated in evidence before a Parliamentary Committee that once when his wife was in ill health he went to one of the immigration offices, and applied for a decent woman to attend on a sick lady. The woman was duly sent down, and found next day in her room lying on the bed in a state best pictured in her own words: “Here I am with my yard of clay, blowing a cloud, you say.”
It is evident that a batch of thoroughly bad girls cost a colony from first to last, in the way of prisons, hospitals, and public morals, ten times as much as the free passages across the seas of an equal number of worthy Irish women, free from the work-house taint. Of one of these gangs which landed in Quebec not many years ago, it has been asserted by the immigration superintendents that the traces are visible to this day, for wherever the women went, “sin, and shame, and death were in their track.” The Irish unions have no desire in the matter beyond that of getting rid of their most abandoned girls; their interests and those of the colonies they supply are diametrically opposed. No inspection, no agreements, no supervision can be effective in the face of facts like these. The class that the unions can afford to send, Canada and Tasmania cannot afford to keep. Women are sent out with babies in their arms; no one will take them into service because the children are in the way, and in a few weeks they fall chargeable on one of the colonial benevolent societies, to be kept till the children grow up or the mothers die. Even when the girls are not so wholly vicious as to be useless in service, they are utterly ignorant of everything they ought to know. Of neither domestic nor farm-work have they a grain of knowledge. Of thirteen who were lately sent to an up-country town, but one knew how to cook, or wash, or milk, or iron, while three of them had agreed to refuse employment unless they were engaged to serve together. The agents are at their wits’ ends; either the girls are so notoriously infamous in their ways of life that no one will hire them, or else they are so extravagant in their new-found “independence” that they on their side will not be hired. Meanwhile the Irish authorities lay every evil upon the long sea voyage. They say that they select the best of girls, but a few days at sea suffice to demoralize them.
The colonies could not do better than combine for the establishment of a new and more efficient emigration agency in Ireland. To avoid the evil, by as far as possible refusing to meet it face to face at all, South Australia has put restrictions on her Irish immigration; for here as in America it is found that the Scotch and Germans are the best of immigrants. The Scotch are not more successful in Adelaide than everywhere in the known world. Half the most prominent among the statesmen of the Canadian Confederation, of Victoria, and of Queensland, are born Scots, and all the great merchants of India are of the same nation. Whether it be that the Scotch emigrants are for the most part men of better education than those of other nations, of whose citizens only the poorest and most ignorant are known to emigrate, or whether the Scotchman owes his uniform success in every climate to his perseverance or his shrewdness, the fact remains, that wherever abroad you come across a Scotchman, you invariably find him prosperous and respected.
The Scotch emigrant is a man who leaves Scotland because he wishes to rise faster and higher than he can at home, whereas the emigrant Irishman quits Galway or County Cork only because there is no longer food or shelter for him there. The Scotchman crosses the seas in calculating contentment; the Irishman in sorrow and despair.
At the Burra Burra and Kapunda copper-mines there is not much to see, so my last days in South Australia were given to the politics of the colony, which present one singular feature. For the elections to the Council or Upper House, for which the franchise is a freehold worth £50 or a leasehold of £20 a year, the whole country forms but a single district, and the majority elect their men. In a country where party feeling runs high, such a system, were it possible, would evidently unite almost all the evils conceivable in a plan of representation, but in a peaceful colony it undoubtedly works well. Having absolute power in their hands, the majority here, as in the selection of a governor for an American State, use their position with great prudence, and make choice of the best men that the country can produce. The franchise for the Lower House, for the elections to which the colony is “districted,” is the simple one of six months’ residence, which with the ballot works irreproachably.
The day that I left Adelaide was also that upon which Captain Cadell, the opener of the Murray to trade, sailed with his naval expedition to fix upon a capital for the Northern territory; that coast of tropical Australia which faces the Moluccas. As Governor Gilpin had pressed me to stay, he pressed me to go with him, making as an inducement a promise to name after me either “a city” or a headland. He said he should advise me to select the headland, because that would remain, whereas the city probably would not. When I pleaded that he had no authority to carry passengers, he offered to take me as his surgeon. Hitherto the expeditions have discovered nothing but natives, mangroves, alligators, and sea-slugs, and the whole of the money received from capitalists at home, for 300,000 acres of land to be surveyed and handed over to them in North Australia, being now exhausted, the government are seriously thinking of reimbursing the investors and giving up the search for land. It would be as cheap to colonize equatorial Africa from Adelaide, as tropical Australia. If the Northern territory is ever to be rendered habitable, it must be by Queensland that the work is done.
It is not certain that North Australia may not be found to yield gold in plenty. In a little known manuscript of the seventeenth century, the northwest of Australia is called “The land of gold;” and we are told that the fishermen of Solor, driven on to this land of gold by stress of weather, picked up in a few hours their boat full of gold nuggets, and returned in safety. They never dared repeat their voyage, on account of their dread of the unknown seas; but Manoel Godinho de Eredia was commissioned by the Portuguese Lord Admiral of India to explore this gold land, and enrich the crown of Portugal by the capture of the treasures it contained. It would be strange enough if gold came to be discovered on the northwest coast, in the spot from which the Portuguese reported their discovery.
By dawn, after one of the most stifling of Australian nights, I left Port Adelaide for King George‘s Sound. A long narrow belt of a clear red-yellow light lay glowing along the horizon to the east, portending heat and drought; elsewhere the skies were of a deep blue-black. As we steamed past Kangaroo Island, and through Investigator Straits, the sun shot up from the tawny plains, and the hot wind from the northern desert, rising on a sudden after the stillness of the night, whirled clouds of sand over the surface of the bay.